January 146:15 p.m.

My step-father is showering. The water travels from
somewhere beneath the floors through moaning pipes to the
showerhead. A water organ, it is, untuned. I sit at the
dining room table, round--But now that of my parents. The
table cloth is of blue and white circles. The table cloth is
rarely removed. We dine before the television set here. I'm
not particularly fond of that custom but I do not want to
offend the folks by sitting apart from them. Tacos tonight.
An irony in that. But an irony that will only become clear
later, when I get to Mexico--and by then forgotten. Ground
turkey meat. I'm a demi-vegetarian trapped in a land of
meat-eating prowess. Must be real vegetarians in southern
Kansas somewhere, but I've never met one. My step-father
says the word vegetarian the way his father probably said the
word hippie. "VegeTAREian," he says, kind of out of the side
of his mouth, quietly, from the diaphragm, if you can feel
that. I offered the television a taste of my taco. It
responded with laugh tracks.

"Are you sure you don't want normal hot chocolate?"

"Normal?"

"Mine's fat free and you mix water with it. I have the
real stuff that you mix with hot milk."

"I'm used to the water kind."

"You are?"

"Yeah."

"You use four of these..." And my mother holds up a
spoon. "...heaping."

"Okay."

I've done no scribbling since before Christmas. But
then, not much describable has happened since before
Christmas. It is now mid-January and my step-father has
finished his ablutions and sits reverently before America's
Funniest Home Videos. The way it was hard for me to hear my
grandmother's voice, it is hard for me to see my family. It
is all so familiar that it is invisible. A couple of things
I could mention, I suppose. I have a younger cousin who,
once a girl, is now a woman. I made references to
Steppenwolf and pondered peanuts and Faust while observing
naked women dance on a Keller Avenue stage. But I'll return
to this later. First, since there is little else to mention,
I should finally get to that point I've stalled on since El
Paso--How this journey began.

My grandmother says "axely" instead of "actually." She
uses "usely" for "usually." Grocery store items are not
"expensive" but "high." She is quite attentive in
conversation or when addressed. And even though she's a year
older than her brother she could easily pass for ten years
his junior. Her glasses are round circles of heavy glass that
hang suspended before crystal blue eyes.

This all really began in San Diego.

I will step away now for a grail, for four heaping
teaspoons, for boiling water.

Maybe the stalling is because it's difficult. And how
do I begin? How do I describe this? Shakespeare, I can say.
Mozart. Michelangelo. With them I guess I can begin. Or
with my unfinished novel. Or with the nexus between these.
I mean, okay, you can duck the question and say these men
were geniuses. At least I call that ducking the question
because it explains nothing. Or, you can go hyper-intellectual or hyper-academic and tear their works apart and
examine them piece by piece and explain how this part relates
to that part and how the parts and the relations makes their
works so unbelievably marvelous. But that too is ducking
the question, right? I mean, it is not about pieces of the
works. It is not a brick here or a brick there, a flourish,
this brushstroke, or a note. It is something beyond that.
It is in the whole edifice. No hyper-academic would refute
that. No man on the street would contest that. Any one
looking at the works of these artists and trying to
understand the marvel of them would agree to that. But that
brings me back to where I started. What is their secret?
What is it in their works that is not in the works of their
contemporaries? Why does painter X in this chapel create a
fresco that is adored for five hundred years while painter Y
in a neighboring chapel paints a fresco that is forgotten
after a generation? What is the difference? How did they do
it? I look at a serenade or the Sistine Ceiling or Hamlet
and I am astonished, astonished at something, but at
something I do not understand. It is there. And I feel it.
And it is real. Unmistakably. You can't turn from it. You
can't pretend it is not there. And yet I do not know what it
is that I cannot turn from, that I cannot pretend is not
there. It is mysteriously vivid; an arcanum that pricks
you. And you feel the pricking and you submit to the
pricking and you enjoy even its smart but you never know
where the pricking comes from. What it is. What is it? What
did they find? Their genius was not a mere feat of
technique. A million brilliant technicians have come and
passed into forgottenhood. These were feats of something
else. Something I do not understand. Something I see, that I
cannot deny, but that I cannot define. That is the mystery,
this incomprehensible secret. And so one day I was standing
over my unfinished novel. I was sitting on my creaking stool
looking through a sheaf of papers, reading through its second
draft, and I realized that it was not there. I realized I
did not have the secret.

"...Roger Bacon was a scholar...coded the recipe in an
anagram in the Latin text...the bigger the..."

My stepfather yawns watching some educational program on
explosives. All those hours he works! But he'll be retiring
soon. Thirty-six years with Beech Aircraft. They have given
him a lot those years, those hours, that yawn. At the moment,
in fact, I sit at his blue-and-white-circled dining room
table, warm; warm enough even to remove my sweater, drape it
over the back of this nice oak-wood chair, and sniff at the
two inches of snow that blanket the back yard. And I have
just relished a mug of hot chocolate--the mug, the hot
chocolate both borne of my stepfather's yawn. And I'm about
to draw a glass of water out of my stepfather's faucet--the
glass, the water again borne of his yawn. And it is a cold
winter night. And I am not cold.

"...coded the recipe in an anagram in the Latin text..."
And I wouldn't mind borrowing his stereo equipment at
the moment. I've become enamored of late with these young
women singers. Their flat bellies. Their cool voices.
Natalie Merchant. It'd be nice to marry her.

And so, sitting there, looking over my unfinished novel,
I thought this: Mozart's works deserve to exist.
Michelangelo's works deserve to exist. Homer's works deserve
to exist. Over and over again, I thought this. And I thought
it until I came to the conclusion that my work did not
deserve to exist. And I gave up on my unfinished novel then.
But after some more thinking I realized that if across the
span of history only Michelangelo's and Homer's and Bach's
works deserved to exist then virtually everyone's life was
pointless. And this seemed to me unreasonable. So I
revised. And I said, well, maybe such works are not the only
works that deserve to exist, but they are the only works that
deserve to last. So my unfinished novel may not deserve to
last, but maybe it will one day deserve to exist. But again,
on stating this to myself, I felt the enervating affect of
their majesty, of their stupendousness hovering over me. How
could I say such a thing with such perfection looking down at
me? With Homer looking down at me. With Bach looking down at
me. With Rembrandt looking down at me. And so I revised
again. I said I guess my unfinished novel might deserve to
exist, but only if it seeks to do what the greats did--and I
gulped--even if it fails. I mean, if I did everything I could
to make it deserve to last, to bring it up to their
impossible level--Yes, if I did everything I could do to make
it last, then, then it might at least deserve to exist. But
then I was back to the question that began it all. What did
they do to make their works last? Why do their works last?

"She went thataway," I hear my stepfather say. He speaks
to my mother who stands out of earshot.

"She's under my feet," I call to them.

Their ferret, of sleek blonde fur, is roaming the house.
Merlin is her name. She chases her tail.

I just scribbled six or seven redundant lines and then
circled them and then crossed them out. I most feel the need
for this scribbling when I have no way to work on my
unfinished novel. The day before arriving in El Paso, for
example, I did not feel the need because I was preoccupied
with getting out of Tucson. On arrival in El Paso, however,
and on finding my minutes there bare, my thoughts idle, the
parching of this thirst for my work returned. Scribbling
appeases it. Along the road I plan to work in wayside RV
parks--in Dallas, San Antonio, Veracruz, Mexico City,
Querétaro, Guadalajara, Tijuana. I will work over my
unfinished novel in these places. I will gauge my unfinished
novel against its source in these places. But betweentimes!
Betweentimes these notes will have to satisfy. For the need
is implacable. It is why I sat scribbling at my
grandmother's dining room table, round, that night, half-listening to her watch television. It is why I sit scribbling
at my parents dining room table, round, tonight, half-listening to commentary on Alfred Nobel, the "inventor of
dynamite." And when I don't have some part-time job
infringing upon my time, as I do not now, the impulse
becomes acute. Real guilt I suffer if I don't take advantage
of my liberty to work twelve hours a day. But I can't really
do that here--Too cold in the Winnebago. And when I tried to
do so yesterday it upset my mother.

Anyway, as I just alluded, one day I realized that
since I did not know the secret, my unfinished novel might
become a sort of case study for me. The novel lacks
something. I know this. It does not have something that the
works of the greats have. Maybe this something is the secret,
or at least an indication toward the secret. If I went back
to where the novel came from... If I revisited the novel's
source... I just might...

"This is Jackie," a bass timbre intones. "This is
Jackie's first new car."

An effective commercial, but sickening. As if a first
new automobile elevates one into some higher, more sublime
realm. They treat it like religious initiation: A subdued
ambience, pregnant; a cathedral silence. All it lacks is
that shaft of light falling across Jackie's brow, the
stigmata appearing upon her palms.

My mother might have been upset by my working through
dinner last night. But again, it's that guilt I was talking
about. If I don't clock unsustainable hours the guilt picks
at me. For I'm cheating myself, you know. I'm wasting a
fleet opportunity. I told her that. And then I put in my
twelve hour day. And then I felt much better. But maybe she
did not understand. And the temperature really dropped
again. And so this morning, working out in the Winnebago, as
I sat wrapped in my electric blanket, as I sat breathing the
stink of propane fumes, as I sat cursing the broken heater
and the thermometer that would rise to no higher than forty-five degrees, I remembered I could sit here at this round
dining room table, in the cozy warmth, and scribble these
notes. And I realized then that still I had not explained
this journey's beginning--the mystery. In I came in the late
afternoon. Here at the table I fed and thought about what I
might say. At last I have said it. At last it is behind me.
I really dreaded that exposition. But it's over. I'm in a
good humor now. I'm warm. These notes are satisfying
indeed.

Last night I shivered out in the Winnebago after dark.
My fingers burned with cold as I strained to recall and flesh
out some dialogue for The Don Quixote Piece. I've always been
infatuated with ballet dancers. Their bodies are such perfect
expressions of the human form--even moreso than athletes, I
think. It was a story a dancer told me once that I was
trying to recall. A simple uneventful thing, but so dancerly
in attitude. It's always stuck with me. That girl was a real
beauty, a real Dulcinea. We only went out a few times.

Nuclear explosions now. But here again with
religiosity. Some celestial strings score what must be
footage of the mushroom cloud. It seems to say that project
X uncovered the touchstone to the divine, or made of man the
divine, or gave to man the power of the divine.

I worked The Sandra Texts this morning, and then that
dialogue for The Don Quixote Piece. Then I read in Atlas
Shrugged and from the Dhammapada of the Buddha. The cold is
pesky. In the mornings I have to warm the connections to my
computer monitor with my breath. Otherwise the display is
just tiny green crosses on cool gray fuzz. And the fumes off
the stove and oven burners are giving me headaches. Add to
this the constant adjustments I make in my electric blanket
to fend off the tendrils of cold and you will understand why
I'm growing anxious to get south and into Mexico. No snow
there, or frost on the monitor screen, or moaning CPU.
Trapped here by money though. Waiting for tax returns. But
I'm not panicked. I haven't spent a cent. It's like
treading water. Tactically I suppose it could be an
annoyance. I really want to be in and out of the Mexican
desert before the heat hits in April. And the desert is the
end of the journey. So I need to continue on.

It takes a long time to scribble like this. Just this--and in three hours.

My stepfather watches Frazier.

These images of home are not so bad a place to begin
considering how foreign it will all become soon. But I guess
I'm not beginning really, but already amid.

My hot chocolate sits still empty. A stray cat stands at
the back door. "Buddy," I think they call him. I can't
remember. You can see the cat's breath.

"Watcha doin'?" my stepfather asks. He just appeared
from around the corner. He adjusts and readjusts the cereal
bowl and spoon with which he will eat his tomorrow morning's
breakfast before going to work.